Exclusion and Inclusion in Personal Media Networks

Rspencer

Informations

• Publié par: ygahovax
• Nombre de lectures: 87
• Langue: English

Extrait

Exclusion and Inclusion in Personal Media Networks Mathieu O’Neil Australian National University [e-mail] Abstract Personal media bypass mass media hierarchies, generating a sense of community and proximity. Print ‘zines’ and online ‘blogs’ also serve to culturally and socially distinguish those who produce and consume them. Digital network technology has transformed personal media. For example, blogs enable viewers to add comments, extending the parameters of inclusion. At the same time, instances of exclusion seem to proliferate in the ‘blogosphere’. The simplification of complex tools makes it ever-more easy to create personal media: hence the multiplication of internal exclusion procedures which serve to differentiate agents equalised by undifferentiated inclusion in dominant networks. Introduction In contemporary societies, the production of personal media is generally understood as affording isolated individuals the opportunity to generate a sense of community and proximity. At the same time, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1979), individuals seek to distinguish their cultural practices from that which they perceive to be common, through the often hidden procedures of exclusion of outsiders and inclusion of insiders. How is this contradictory process affected by the advent of the network society? It appears that information and communication technology (ICT) has profoundly affected the nature of personal media. For example, the participatory nature of some Internet-based personal media, which allows casual onlookers to freely post comments, radically alters the processes of inclusion and exclusion: in theory, there can be no ‘other’ to discriminate against. Could it then be argued that, perhaps, the inclusion of personal media in digital networks is an inherently democratic endeavour, which expands the scope of communication? This paper proposes to explore the impact of digital networks on the cultural field of personal media by comparing the distinctive procedures at work in two types of personal media: ‘zines’ (idiosyncratic amateur print publications) and ‘web-logs’ or ‘blogs’ (chronologically updated personal websites). Though zines are by no means extinct, the growing popularity of the Internet has significantly reduced their number. For this reason, I will sometimes refer to the zine market in the past tense, as it is no longer as vibrant as it was during its heyday, which stretched from 1980 to 1995, and was known in the United States as the ‘zine explosion’. This paper is informed by two online surveys dealing with the social background, personal media production and distribution activities, and cultural preferences of personal media producers. In December 1996-January 1997, I collected 115 responses from North American zine editors, and in August- September 2004 I collected thirty responses from North American and Australian bloggers.

1